5 ms·

Well overdue. Actually, go further: ban citations from commercial journals, and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative during hiring and promot

Well overdue. Actually, go further: ban citations from commercial journals, and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative during hiring and promotions. Make it clear that no serious research is published in Elsevier and co. anymore.

rocqua 8y ago
Banning citations goes wayyyy to far. The journals are bad, but the science published in them is not. To ban citations would require either plagarizing or leaving swathes of subjects untouched.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  After a cut-off date.
  - lol768 8y ago
    Does this date refer to the time of the publishing of the cited work, or the time at which the citation itself was made?
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      The former I would imagine.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    We currently cite ArxiV, we cite books out of print, we cite websites, heck we cite 'Mein Kampf' when discussing facism. We cite anything that was used as a source. Banning citations means either changing the above practice, or banning certain sources from being used by academics. That is sacrificing science for the sake of ideology. We ought to consider sources for their inherent quality, not whether we like their publisher.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      I get what you're trying to say here, but this is not about work that has already been done, it is about work that still will be done and to avoid the sharecropping that will inevitably be the result from those citations. By giving ample warning it would be clear that those venues are toxic and that there is a good chance that your work would be better served by seeking an alternative venue for publication.
      - kd0amg 8y ago
        And then when someone does publish work in that venue, are others doing related research supposed to refuse to acknowledge related published work? That's a pretty serious ethics breach in itself.
- derefr 8y ago
  I think the idea is that these journals should be secondary sources, rather than primary sources, for papers. Sure, your paper is in Nature, and that's neat and all and gives it more visibility, but people should be citing the arXiv copy that came out either in parallel to, or before, the for-profit journal copy did. Journals should just be serving as aggregators of content, not hosts of content†. It's the same idea as how public companies' earliest issuance of any potentially-stock-affecting news, has to be through equal-access public channels that investors can subscribe to for equal-timeliness reaction to news (rather than, y'know, Elon Musk's Twitter feed, where Twitter gets to control who sees what when.) People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. Not being able to doesn't just discourage reading papers, it discourages ad-hoc peer review—the precise point of having journals in the first place. (Specifically, it discourages the part of ad-hoc peer-review where you check a paper's citations to see if the claims you find hard to believe, but which are cited, are actually backed up by something you can believe in the cited paper.) When the citation is to a closed-access journal, you have to happen to coincidentally have a subscription to that journal in order to be able to find out what the citation really says. If the citation's source journal is both for-profit and obscure, then you probably don't have that subscription—so the given citation could have been entirely made-up, and you'll never know. † Journals being aggregators of content also implies that a paper should be able to be published in as many journals as want to carry it, because none of them "own" the resulting content anyway. In that sense, scientific papers would be a lot like news-wire releases: something that any distributor can pay for the right to print a copy of.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    Hmmm, the 'journal are aggregators' model sounds really interesting. It essentially captures the concept that the value of journals is 'legitimizing' papers. > People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. I really like that, but what about citing books? It seems like sources that are paid for should still be used. We shouldn't hamstring science / scientists. Similarly, we shouldn't just pass of ideas from payed sources as our own ideas. Instead I would propose the slightly weaker rule: 'Where available, cite the free version' This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions. I see another issue though. Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.
- stale2002 8y ago
  > To ban citations would require either plagarizing That sounds fine to me. The only people harmed would be the for profit journals.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    No, very much no. Plagiarism is not about copyright it is about credit. Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. In the academic world, people building on your work is essentially how you get evaluated. If people build of your work without saying so, they are doing two bad things. - They get recognition for things they did not come up with - The person who did come up with the thing does not get that recognition Consider the argument between Newton and Leibniz about who invented calculus first. That wasn't about copyright, it was purely about credit and plagiarism.
    - Nullabillity 8y ago
      Yes, and that's the point! If commercial journals are categorically no longer cited then people whose performance reviews rely on citations will switch to other outlets.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      > Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. Indeed they would be hurt. If your research is only in the paid for journals, then you would get screwed. I just don't think this is a bad thing. The only people harmed would be the journal and the scientist who chose to lock up his research behind a paywall. It sounds like a win to me to screw over people who lock up their research.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative It's a good start, but hand-me-down science in open-access journals is no better than putting it into Elsevier. Hindawi instead of Elsevier probably isn't even cheaper! Money is too tight to hand it to a sketchy publisher.

rocqua 8y ago

Banning citations goes wayyyy to far. The journals are bad, but the science published in them is not. To ban citations would require either plagarizing or leaving swathes of subjects untouched.

jacquesm 8y ago
After a cut-off date.
- lol768 8y ago
  Does this date refer to the time of the publishing of the cited work, or the time at which the citation itself was made?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    The former I would imagine.
- rocqua 8y ago
  We currently cite ArxiV, we cite books out of print, we cite websites, heck we cite 'Mein Kampf' when discussing facism. We cite anything that was used as a source. Banning citations means either changing the above practice, or banning certain sources from being used by academics. That is sacrificing science for the sake of ideology. We ought to consider sources for their inherent quality, not whether we like their publisher.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    I get what you're trying to say here, but this is not about work that has already been done, it is about work that still will be done and to avoid the sharecropping that will inevitably be the result from those citations. By giving ample warning it would be clear that those venues are toxic and that there is a good chance that your work would be better served by seeking an alternative venue for publication.
    - kd0amg 8y ago
      And then when someone does publish work in that venue, are others doing related research supposed to refuse to acknowledge related published work? That's a pretty serious ethics breach in itself.
derefr 8y ago
I think the idea is that these journals should be secondary sources, rather than primary sources, for papers. Sure, your paper is in Nature, and that's neat and all and gives it more visibility, but people should be citing the arXiv copy that came out either in parallel to, or before, the for-profit journal copy did. Journals should just be serving as aggregators of content, not hosts of content†. It's the same idea as how public companies' earliest issuance of any potentially-stock-affecting news, has to be through equal-access public channels that investors can subscribe to for equal-timeliness reaction to news (rather than, y'know, Elon Musk's Twitter feed, where Twitter gets to control who sees what when.) People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. Not being able to doesn't just discourage reading papers, it discourages ad-hoc peer review—the precise point of having journals in the first place. (Specifically, it discourages the part of ad-hoc peer-review where you check a paper's citations to see if the claims you find hard to believe, but which are cited, are actually backed up by something you can believe in the cited paper.) When the citation is to a closed-access journal, you have to happen to coincidentally have a subscription to that journal in order to be able to find out what the citation really says. If the citation's source journal is both for-profit and obscure, then you probably don't have that subscription—so the given citation could have been entirely made-up, and you'll never know. † Journals being aggregators of content also implies that a paper should be able to be published in as many journals as want to carry it, because none of them "own" the resulting content anyway. In that sense, scientific papers would be a lot like news-wire releases: something that any distributor can pay for the right to print a copy of.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Hmmm, the 'journal are aggregators' model sounds really interesting. It essentially captures the concept that the value of journals is 'legitimizing' papers. > People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. I really like that, but what about citing books? It seems like sources that are paid for should still be used. We shouldn't hamstring science / scientists. Similarly, we shouldn't just pass of ideas from payed sources as our own ideas. Instead I would propose the slightly weaker rule: 'Where available, cite the free version' This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions. I see another issue though. Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.
stale2002 8y ago
> To ban citations would require either plagarizing That sounds fine to me. The only people harmed would be the for profit journals.
- rocqua 8y ago
  No, very much no. Plagiarism is not about copyright it is about credit. Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. In the academic world, people building on your work is essentially how you get evaluated. If people build of your work without saying so, they are doing two bad things. - They get recognition for things they did not come up with - The person who did come up with the thing does not get that recognition Consider the argument between Newton and Leibniz about who invented calculus first. That wasn't about copyright, it was purely about credit and plagiarism.
  - Nullabillity 8y ago
    Yes, and that's the point! If commercial journals are categorically no longer cited then people whose performance reviews rely on citations will switch to other outlets.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    > Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. Indeed they would be hurt. If your research is only in the paid for journals, then you would get screwed. I just don't think this is a bad thing. The only people harmed would be the journal and the scientist who chose to lock up his research behind a paywall. It sounds like a win to me to screw over people who lock up their research.

HarryHirsch 8y ago

and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative It's a good start, but hand-me-down science in open-access journals is no better than putting it into Elsevier. Hindawi instead of Elsevier probably isn't even cheaper! Money is too tight to hand it to a sketchy publisher.